Search smh:

Search in:

Australia's supply chains link directly to Bangladeshi workers' fates

Bangladeshi soldiers guard the site of a collapsed garments factory near Dhaka in 2005. Photo: Reuters

Australian brands are being wilfully blind to the dangerous conditions in the factories they use, write South Asia Correspondent Ben Doherty and Consumer Affairs Reporter Sarah Whyte

For the simplest item in the wardrobe, the T-shirt has a complex history.

To reach an Australian shop shelf, the typical foreign-made T-shirt will cross oceans and pass through dozens of factories and scores of hands.

From the picking of the cotton (Uzbekistan is notorious for using forced child labour during harvest season), to the weaving of material (southern Indian factories "buy" the hidden labour of underage girls on illegal three-year contracts), to the garment stitchers of Bangladesh (where industrial accidents kill with regularity), there is opportunity for exploitation and accident.

Advertisement

The past 18 months in Bangladesh – in which at least five factory fires and collapses have killed more than 1200 people – have focused international attention on the global rag trade, particularly the plight of workers at the poorest end of the line.

The last major disaster in Bangladesh was a fire at Aswad Composite Mills – a factory owned by a massive garment producer that exported $US260 million worth of clothes last year.

Seven people died in the Aswad blaze, a week after government inspectors found the factory was “dangerous to human life”.

Aswad was a textile factory, making material that would then be made into clothes for major Western labels, including Australian retailers Kmart, BigW, Target and Just Jeans.

But those Australian companies say they did not know of the factory, or its dangers, and did not need to know because they had “no direct relationship” with it, that it was “a supplier to a supplier”.

They are being wilfully blind to the havoc their supply chains are causing.

These Australian companies know their supply chains have several, sometimes a dozen, links.

To arbitrarily draw a line one step back, at the final factory in Bangladesh, and say "this is where our responsibility ends" is a baleful deception.

Aswad was making material for clothes sold on the shelves of KMart, Target, BigW and Just Jeans. Those clothes are now on the backs of Australian consumers.

People died at their jobs making material for those clothes.

Kmart has been the first to publicly declare the location of its direct suppliers in Bangladesh. This is to be applauded, but it is, as the deaths at Aswad indicate, clearly not enough.

Australian retailers should know, and should publicly declare, the condition and location of all the factories in the chain: from the suppliers to their suppliers, and their suppliers beyond.

The Bangladesh garment industry is improving, and should be supported, not boycotted.

The industry employs more than 4 million workers, many of them women, and many of them poor and without education or other skills. Without the $22 billion in trade it earns, Bangladesh’s economy would collapse.

And it remains attractive as a manufacturing hub. Labour costs are a fraction of those in Australia.

But people in Bangladesh are still, daily, going to work in buildings that will kill them, working in hostile and dangerous conditions, so the world can have cheap T-shirts.

Reforming such a massive, and for so long unregulated, industry will take years.

But it won’t be improved by Australian and other international buyers shrugging off their responsibilities – by putting another link in the chain and saying it’s not their problem.